Eric H Chang

Want to learn more about the vagus nerve, bioelectronic medicine, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research @NorthwellHealth? Check this out: youtu.be/fsRT48Z084Q?si…

1/8 Our preprint is now a peer-reviewed paper :) Big thanks to our reviewers who pushed us to examine our results more carefully and Olivier Wyart (headquarter.paris) for the exquisite visual. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Salk Institute scientist Shrek Chalasani has been awarded up to $41.3 million from ARPA-H to advance a breakthrough technology he pioneered, sonogenetics, which uses ultrasound to precisely control cells within the body. This funding will help transform the Chalasani lab’s discovery into a potential noninvasive therapy for a range of conditions, including peripheral neuropathies. By enabling targeted control of mammalian cells without surgery, sonogenetics could redefine how we treat disease. Learn more: salk.edu/news-release/s… #SalkInstitute #ARPAH #Sonogenetics #Neuroscience #BiomedicalInnovation

Focused Ultrasound in the News! This morning, Rebecca King Crews, wife of actor Terry Crews, revealed her Parkinson’s diagnosis and how focused ultrasound has improved her symptoms. She described reduced tremors and the ability to write with her right hand again for the first time in years. Focused ultrasound was approved by the FDA in 2021 for treating symptoms of Parkinson’s, with expanded approval in 2025 to treat both sides of the brain. Read the full article in @People: bit.ly/47GxA74 Watch the @TODAYShow segment: on.today.com/4vdEhax

An honor to host 2025 Brain Prize recipient, Dr Frank Winkler, for a talk on cancer neuroscience at the Feinstein Institutes @NorthwellHealth! Amazing data from his lab showing pacemaker-like cells and neural activity in tumor progression. Neuromodulation in oncology loading!! #CancerResearch

⏪About two years ago: the Allen Institute & Broad Institute released the largest whole-brain "atlases" counting the number of cell types in each region. 🤨Main surprise: high cell type density in the lower/deeper brain regions. These smaller & less studied areas are main hubs of the #autonomic nervous system. 🚀This sparks our imagination at Ansyme about many(!) new frontiers for #neuroscience and #medicine alike. The March issue of Ansyme Newsletter aims to convey this sense of possibility 👇🏼 open.substack.com/pub/ansyme/p/h…

Our live tissue clearing paper is out in @naturemethods! We achieved optical clearing of mammalian brain tissues without compromising normal neuronal function. Big congrats to @Shigenori774 and our wonderful collaborators! 🎉 nature.com/articles/s4159… (1/10)

The first #SetPointSystem procedure in California was just preformed at @DignityHealth - St. John's Regional Medical Center! Congrats to Dr. Gita Fatemi, Dr. Akinwunmi Oni-Orisan and SJRMC teams. Get the full story: dignityhealth.org/central-coast/… Safety Info: spm.care/ISI

Congrats to the Thaiss Lab. The vagus nerve is so big right now!

Scientists just copied a Fruit Fly's biological brain and trapped it inside of a computer. Not an AI model trained to act like a fly... A total digital copy of a fly !! This is some sick sci-fi stuff: - They scanned and copied the brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, from electron microscopy data. - Then dropped that brain into a simulated body in a video game like environment. The fly walked. It groomed. It fed. Nobody taught it anything. The behavior was already in the wiring. The entire premise of modern AI is that intelligence is something you train into a system. This is proof it's something you can transfer out of one. Wild times

We've uploaded a fruit fly. We took the @FlyWireNews connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model (@Philip_Shiu Nature 2024) and used it to control a MuJoCo physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action. A few things I want to say about what this means and where we're going at @eonsys. 🧵

Sensory neurons in triple-negative breast cancer secrete CGRP that activate fibroblasts to build a collagen fence that blocks out T cells. Targeting the nervous system may be a good way to tear down the fence and give immune cells access to tumors. The authors conclude: "CGRP is a promising biomarker for prognosis and immunotherapy response prediction in TNBC patients." Cell, Volume 189, Issue 4, 1039 - 1055.e20

Wild new Nature paper showing how gut immune cells may initiate and propagate Parkinson’s pathology. Intestinal macrophages can carry misfolded α-synuclein, trigger T-cell responses, and help drive spread from gut → brain. Big implications for “body-first” Parkinson’s and early intervention. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Where exactly do GLP-1 drugs meet the vagus nerve? A new study maps GLP-1 receptor expression in the human nodose ganglion for the first time. About 7% of sensory neurons show moderate to high Glp1r levels. These neurons sit outside the blood brain barrier and regulate feeding. This is a front door through which Ozempic-class drugs may access neural circuits that control appetite and metabolism. This is one explanation for the independent mouse and human studies showing an intact vagus nerve is required for GLP effects. Merchant et al., J Comp Neurol 2026 doi.org/10.1002/cne.70…

PlotGDP: an AI Agent for Bioinformatics Plotting researchhub.com/paper/11075167…

Brain neurons encode specific inflammatory experiences, as if making memories of specific cytokines. In a new @JExpMed paper we tagged the responsible neurons that encode IL-1β signals and store them. Reactivating these neurons launches a precise physiological program without any other inflammatory stimulus. Psychological stress activates the same neurons, a mechanistic explanation for why inflammatory diseases are associated with depression and anxiety, and why psychological stress worsens inflammatory conditions. Congratulations to Okito Hashimoto, Tyler Hepler, Aisling Tynan, Alejandro Torres, Jian Hua Li, Michael Brines, and Sangeeta Chavan on this remarkable discovery!

Neuromodulation for cancer treatment nature.com/articles/s4158…

Happy to share a new paper from my lab published in Cell led by Saurabh Yadav. We demonstrate that myocardial infarction (heart attack) is not just a heart injury, it is a distributed neuroimmune disorder. cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

Seeing is believing! I was fortunate to have a front-row seat when enhanced calcium imaging indicators from @LoogerL transformed #neuroscience using top-down windows into the brain. Now this work from @changsbrain shows a window (the nodose ganglion) into the bottom of the brain. The panorama of medical potential may be even wider!